The Cambridge Companion to Ovid
The Cambridge Companion to Ovid
Ovid was one of the greatest writers of classical antiquity, and arguably the
single most influential ancient poet for post-classical literature and culture. In
this Cambridge Companion chapters by leading authorities from Europe and
North America discuss the backgrounds and contexts for Ovid, the individual
works, and his influence on later literature and art. Coverage of essential infor-
mation is combined with exciting new critical approaches. This Companion
is designed both as an accessible handbook for the general reader who wishes
to learn about Ovid, and as a series of stimulating essays for students of Latin
poetry and of the classical tradition.CAMBRIDGE COMPANIONS TO LITERATURE
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T H E C A M B R I D G E
C O M P A N I O N T O
OVID
E D I T E D B Y
P H I L I P H A R D I E
University Reader in Latin Literature
in the University of Cambridge,
and Fellow of New Hall
published by the press syndicate of the university of cambridge
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Cambridge University Press 2002
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First published 2002
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A
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
The Cambridge companion to Ovid / edited by Philip Hardie.
p. cm. (Cambridge companions to literature)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0 521 77281 8 (hardback) isbn 0 521 77528 0 (paperback)
1. Ovid, 43 bc–17 or 18 ad – Criticism and interpretation – Handbooks, manuals, etc.
2. Epistolary poetry, Latin – History and criticism – Handbooks, manuals, etc.
3. Didactic poetry, Latin – History and criticism – Handbooks, manuals, etc.
4. Love poetry, Latin – History and criticism – Handbooks, manuals, etc.
5. Mythology,
Classical, in literature – Handbooks, manuals, etc. i. Title: Companion to Ovid.
ii. Hardie, Philip R. iii. Series.
′pa6537 .c28 2002
871 .01–dc21 2001037923
isbn 0 521 77281 8 hardback
isbn 0 521 77528 0 paperback
CONTENTS
List of illustrations page x List of contributorsxii
Preface
xvi Introduction
1 philip hardie
Part 1: Contexts and history
1 Ovid and ancient literary history
13 richard tarrant
2 Ovid and early imperial literature
34 philip hardie
3 Ovid and empire 46 thomas habinek
4 Ovid and the professional discourses of scholarship, religion, rhetoric 62 alessandro schiesaro
Part 2: Themes and works
5 Ovid and genre: evolutions of an elegist
79 stephen harrison
6 Gender and sexuality 95 alison sharrock
Contents
7 Myth in Ovid 108 fritz graf
8 Landscape with figures: aesthetics of place in the
Metamorphoses and its tradition 122
stephen hinds
9 Ovid and the discourses of love: the amatory works 150 alison sharrock
10 Metamorphosis in the Metamorphoses 163 andrew feldherr
11 Narrative technique and narratology in the Metamorphoses 180 alessandro barchiesi
12 Mandati memores: political and poetic authority in the Fasti 200 carole newlands
13 Epistolarity: the Heroides 217 duncan f. kennedy
14 Ovid’s exile poetry: Tristia, Epistulae ex Ponto and Ibis 233 gareth williams
Part 3: Reception
15 Ovid in English translation 249 raphael lyne
16 Ovid in the Middle Ages: authority and poetry 264 jeremy dimmick
17 Love and exile after Ovid 288 raphael lyne
18 Re-embodying Ovid: Renaissance afterlives 301 colin burrow
Contents
19 Recent receptions of Ovid 320 duncan f. kennedy
20 Ovid and art 336 christopher allen
Dateline
368
Works cited
371
Index
399
ILLUSTRATIONS
1. Titian, Diana and Actaeon.Duke of Sutherland Collection, on loan to the National Gallery of Scotland. page 143
2. Titian, Diana and Callisto Duke of Sutherland Collection, on loan to the National Gallery of Scotland. 144 3. Pollaiuolo, Apollo and Daphne. C
National Gallery, London. 342 4. Gianlorenzo Bernini, Apollo and Daphne. Rome, Villa Borghese. Photo Alinari. 344 5. Nicolas Poussin, Acis and Galatea. Reproduction courtesy of the National Gallery of Ireland.
345 6. Titian, Diana and Actaeon. C National Gallery, London. 346
7. Aurora and Tithonus, plate for M. de Marolles, Tableaux du temple des muses (1655).
By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
348
The Minotaur.
8. George Frederick Watts, Tate, London 2000.
349 9. Peter Paul Rubens, Lycaon changed into a wolf. Mus´ee d’Art et d’Histoire de Rochefort. 350
Illustrations
10. Plate for Book iii of George Sandys (ed.), Ovid’s
Metamorphoses Englished, Mythologiz’d and Represented in Figures.
By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
352
11. Nicolas Poussin, Polyphemus, Acis and Galatea. Drawing made for Marino. C Windsor, The Royal Collection 2000, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
353 12. Botticelli, Pallas and the Centaur. Florence, Uffizi. Photo Alinari. 356
13. Marcantonio Raimondi, engraving of The Judgement of Paris after Raphael. C Copyright The British Museum. 357 14. Annibale Carracci, Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne.
Rome, Farnese Gallery. Photo Alinari. 359
15. Nicolas Poussin, Orpheus in Hades. Drawing made for Marino. C Windsor, The Royal Collection 2000, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
361 16. Nicolas Poussin, Orpheus and Eurydice. C Paris, Louvre. Photo RMN – Arnaudet. 362
17. Nicolas Poussin, The infant Bacchus entrusted to the nymphs of Nysa; the death of Echo and Narcissus.
Courtesy of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Gift of Mrs. Samuel Sachs in memory of her husband, Samuel Sachs. Photo: Rick Stafford; C
President and Fellows of Harvard College, Harvard University. 363 Nicolas Poussin, Numa Pompilius and the nymph Egeria.
18. C Chantilly, Mus´ee Cond´e. Photo RMN – Harry Br´ejat.
364
CONTRIBUTORS
christopher allen is an art historian and writer who lives in Sydney and teaches at the National Art School. He held two postdoctoral ap- pointments at the Coll`ege de France between 1994 and 1996, and has recently finished writing a volume on French Seventeenth-Century Painting for Thames and Hudson (World of Art). He is also the author, in the same series, of Art in Australia: From Colonization to Postmodernism. He is currently co-editing an edition with commentary of Charles-Alphonse Dufresnoy’s Latin didactic poem on the art of painting, De arte graphica (1668). alessandro barchiesi is Professor of Latin at the University of Siena at Arezzo. His research focuses in particular on Augustan poetry and on the interaction between classics and contemporary criticism and theory. He has published a commentary on Ovid’s Heroides 1–3 (1992), a book on Virgil and papers on Horace and Petronius. His recent books include
The Poet and the Prince (1997) and Speaking Volumes (2001), and he has
co-edited Ovidian Transformations (1999) and Iambic Ideas (2001). He is
Metamorphoses
the general editor of a complete commentary on Ovid’s to be published by the Fondazione Valla. He has been a Nellie Wallace Lecturer in Oxford (1998), a Gray Lecturer in Cambridge (2001) and is currently working on his 2002 Jerome Lectures for the University of Michigan and the American Academy in Rome. colin burrow is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of English at the Univer- sity of Cambridge, and a Fellow and Tutor of Gonville and Caius College.
He has published extensively on relations between classical and European literatures in the Renaissance. His publications include Epic Romance:
Homer to Milton (1993), Edmund Spenser (1996), and The Complete
Sonnets and Poems for the Oxford Shakespeare (2002).
Contributors
jeremy dimmick is a College Lecturer in English at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, having previously been a Junior Research Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He works on Gower and Lydgate, and is writing a book on Ovid in the Middle Ages. andrew feldherr is Assistant Professor of Classics at Princeton Uni- versity. He has published Spectacle and Society in Livy’s History (1998) and articles on Virgil, Ovid and Catullus. He is currently working on a book-length study of the Metamorphoses, focusing specifically on the relationship between politics and narratology in the poem. fritz graf is the Andrew Fleming West Professor in the Department of
Classics at Princeton University, having previously held the chair of Latin Philology and Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean at the University of Basel. His publications include Nordionische Kulte (1985), Greek
Mythology (1985; English translation 1993), Magic in the Ancient World
(1997) and Der Lauf des rollenden Jahres. Zeit und Kalender in Rom (1997). He is currently working on a study of Greek and Roman festivals in the eastern half of the Roman empire, also the topic of his 2000 Gray Lectures at the University of Cambridge. thomas habinek is Professor of Classics at the University of Southern
California. He is the author of The Politics of Latin Literature (1998) and co-editor of The Roman Cultural Revolution (1997). His research consi- ders the social and political dimensions of classical Latin poetry and prose. philip hardie is Reader in Latin Literature at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of New Hall. He is the author of Virgil’s Aeneid: Cosmos
and Imperium (1986), The Epic Successors of Virgil (1993), an edition of
Virgil’s Aeneid Book ix in the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics series (1994) and Ovid’s Poetics of Illusion (2002), and co-editor of Ovidian
Transformations (1999). He is currently contributing to the complete com-
mentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses to be published by the Fondazione Valla. He is a General Editor of the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics series and a Fellow of the British Academy. stephen harrison is Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Corpus Christi
College, Oxford, and Reader in Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Oxford. He is the author of a commentary on Virgil’s Aeneid 10 (1991) and of Apuleius: A Latin Sophist (2000), and is completing a book on genre in Augustan poetry.
Contributors
stephen hinds is Professor and Chair of Classics at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the author of The Metamorphosis of
Persephone: Ovid and the Self-Conscious Muse (1987) and Allusion and
Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry (1998), and co-
editor of Ovidian Transformations (1999). He is also co-editor (with Denis Feeney) of the Roman Literature and its Contexts series published by Cambridge University Press. He is currently preparing a commentary on Ovid’s Tristia Book i for the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics series. duncan f. kennedy is Reader in Latin Literature and the Theory of
Criticism at the University of Bristol. He is the author of The Arts of
Love: Five Studies in the Discourse of Roman Love Elegy (1993) and
Rethinking Reality: Lucretius and the Textualization of Nature (2001).
raphael lyne is a Newton Trust Lecturer at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of New Hall. He is the author of Ovid’s Changing Worlds:
English Metamorphoses 1567–1632 (2001) and of articles on Renaissance
literature and classical imitation.carole newlands is Professor and Chair of Classics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She has published Playing with Time: Ovid and the
Statius’ Silvae and the Poetics of Empire (2002) and has
Fasti (1995) and general research interests in Roman studies and imperial and late Antique poetry. alessandro schiesaro has taught at the University of Wisconsin,
Madison and Princeton University and is currently Professor of Latin at King’s College, London. He has written on didactic poetry, and is the author of Simulacrum et imago: gli argomenti analogici nel De rerum natura (1990); he has also published on Virgil, Ovid, Seneca, Apuleius and Leopardi. He has co-edited Mega Nepios (1993) and The Roman
Cultural Revolution (1997), and has recently completed a monograph on
Seneca’s Thyestes.alison sharrock is Reader in Classics at the University of Manchester.
Her research interests cover a range of topics in Latin literature, around the epicentre of Ovid’s amatory poetry. Previous books include Seduction II
and Repetition in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria (1994) and (co-edited with Helen
Morales) Intratextuality: Greek and Roman Textual Relations (2000). A book entitled Fifty Key Classical Authors (co-authored with Rhiannon Ash) is forthcoming with Routledge. In preparation is a book-length re- vision of her 1999 W. B. Stanford Memorial Lectures entitled Fabulous
Artifice: Poetics and Playfulness in Roman Comedy.
Contributors
richard tarrant has taught at the University of Toronto and at Harvard University, where he is currently Pope Professor of the Latin Language and Literature and Harvard College Professor. He has published commentaries on Seneca’s Agamemnon (1976) and Thyestes (1985), and is one of the co-authors of Texts and Transmissions: A Guide to the Latin Classics (1983). He has recently completed an Oxford Classical Text of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, and his next project is a commentary on Virgil’s Aeneid
Book xii for the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics series. He is a General Editor of the Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries series. gareth williams is Associate Professor of Classics at Columbia Univer- sity. He has published Banished Voices: Readings in Ovid’s Exile Poetry
(1994) and is currently producing an edition of selected dialogues of Seneca for the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics series.
PREFACE
Ovid is arguably the single most important author from classical antiquity for the post-classical western tradition. This Companion aims to locate Ovid’s dazzling œuvre within the history of ancient Roman culture and literature, and also to illustrate some of the many ways in which his texts have been used by later writers and artists. It is designed both as an introduction to basic aspects of Ovid’s works and their reception, and as a sample of the range of approaches that have emerged during what has been nothing less than an explosion of critical and theoretical studies of Ovid in recent years, after a period of neglect; we hope that the volume may also provide signposts for future work. Our intention is to stimulate as much as to inform.
I am grateful to all the contributors for their good-humoured responsive- ness to a sometimes importunate editor, and also to our copy-editor, Muriel Hall. For their expertise and understanding I owe especial thanks to Pauline Hire of Cambridge University Press, who first suggested that I might under- take this volume, and to her successor at the Press, Michael Sharp.
Tales from Ovid by Ted Hughes printed in the epigraph
The quotation from to the Introduction has been reproduced with permission from Faber and Faber Ltd, London and Farrar, Strauss & Giroux Inc., New York.
PHILIP HARDIE
Introduction
Descend again, be pleased to reanimate
This revival of those marvels. Reveal, now, exactly How they were performed From the beginning1
Up to this moment.As the twentieth century drew to its close Ovid’s star shone brightly in the sky, at least of the Anglo-Saxon world. Two volumes of adaptations of stories from the Metamorphoses, published by Faber & Faber, turned out to be 2 bestsellers. One of these, Tales from Ovid (1997), was the last but one collection published before his death by the Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, to be followed by Birthday letters (1998), poems written to his wife Sylvia Plath over the decades following her suicide. The juxtaposition has a certain irony. Birthday letters, addressed to one of the heroines of modern poetry, is written in a confessional mode that caters to a continuing post-Romantic craving for a literature of sincerity and truth to life. Tales from Ovid reworks the most self-consciously fictive poem of a white male poet, dead for almost two millennia. His works were to become a byword for a playful detachment from the serious business of life, and as a result went into a critical eclipse during the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries.
Life, it might be said, caught up with the poet when Ovid was sent into exile on the shore of the Black Sea in ad 8. Thereupon he did turn to a plangent self-expression in the verse letters from exile. But even so Ovid could not win, for these confessional works in the first-person singular were for long dismissed as inferior; their repetitive self-obsession was not read sympathetically as the history of a soul in pain, but taken as an index of Ovid’s expulsion from the fertile garden of poetic feigning. 1 2 Hughes (1997) 3, translating Met. 1.1–4.
Hofmann and Lasdun (1994); Hughes (1997).
philip hardie
With the recent flood of scholarly criticism of the exile poetry, the reanimation of Ovid’s poetic corpus has been completed, at least in the aca- demic world. One of the fruits of the intense cultivation of the exile poetry has been an appreciation of the complex links between the poetry of after ad 8 and the earlier works, a continuity bridging the drastic change in the poet’s circumstances consequent on his removal from the metropolitan cen- tre to an outpost of the Roman empire. With a hindsight to which Ovid himself steers us, all parts of his dazzlingly varied and shape-shifting poetic career seem to form themselves into a single plan, beginning with an elegy of erotic complaint in which the lover attempts to gain entry to the locked door of his girlfriend, and ending with the elegies of an exile vainly (as it 3 turned out) trying to win the right to return to Rome. Stephen Harrison
(chapter 5) traces the change-in-continuity of Ovid’s elegiac career.
Both bodies of first-person elegy, the youthful Amores and the late exile poetry, are concerned to relate the private experiences of the poet to the wider worlds of Greek mythology and of Roman history and politics, worlds explored more directly in the works of the central section of Ovid’s career, the Heroides, Metamorphoses, and Fasti. As Richard Tarrant (chapter 1) and Gareth Williams (chapter 14) show, the exile poems construct themselves by superimposing the ‘facts’ of Ovid’s exile on features, both of form and content, from all three of these earlier works (at least one of which, the Fasti, continued to be revised in exile). Most striking is Ovid’s conversion of his own exile into a real-life example of the kind of incredible story told in the
Metamorphoses. Ovid complains that in exile he has lost the powers that
enabled the poetic triumph of the Metamorphoses, yet this dissembles the fact that business continues as usual. From hexameter mythological epic to first-person elegiac letters from exile seems an almost inevitable progression.
Perhaps Ted Hughes’ apparently disparate closing brace of poetry books also has an Ovidian logic. An easy way to trace continuity would be to lean on Ted Hughes’ own location of the secret of Ovid’s enduring popularity in the 4 fact that ‘Above all, Ovid was interested in passion.’ Raphael Lyne points out that Hughes’ version of the Metamorphoses ends with the Pyramus and Thisbe story, and with two lovers ‘closed in a single urn’ (chapter 15, p. 263). But consider the following: a collection of fantastic mythical tales, followed by a collection of letters prompted by the fact of an irreversible loss, and including as addressee a wife whom the writer will never see again. Is the author Ovid or Ted Hughes? 3 On the unity of the work of Ovid as elegist see also Holzberg (1999) 60 ‘It is actually
possible to read Ovid’s works from the Heroides through to his exile poetry as a series of
4 “metamorphoses” of the elegiac discourse found in the Amores.’ Hughes (1997) p. ix.
Introduction
Hughes himself perhaps never saw things in this way. Is it then illegitimate for the reader aware of the Ovidian pattern to discern it in the shape of Hughes’ œuvre? That would at least be a highly Ovidian appropriation. Of all ancient poets Ovid is perhaps the most aware of the rewards and hazards of his own reception. The Metamorphoses closes with a reworking of Horace’s ode on his own monumental fame ( Odes 3.30), in which Ovid looks forward to an eternity in which ‘I shall be read on the lips of the people’ ( Met. 15.878). The Latin words, ore legar populi, could also be translated ‘I [i.e. my soul] shall be gathered on the lips of the people’, hinting at an image of poetic tradition and transmission as a Pythagoreanizing re- 5 embodiment of dead poets in the bodies of living poets – or living readers. Metempsychosis allows texts to have a life of their own after the death of their original owners and producers. The history of Ovid’s reception starts with Ovid himself, who after the figurative death of exile rereads and redeploys his own unfinished Metamorphoses to reflect his own altered circumstances. ‘By rewriting its opening lines, Ovid will force us to reread the entire poem 6 in a slightly different way.’ But an interest in his own reception predates the exile: Duncan Kennedy (chapter 13) shows that the uncertainty of the legendary writers of the Heroides as to whether their letters will ever reach their destination, and, if they do, what reception they will find, figures Ovid’s own concern for an appropriate readership. This is the poet who addresses one of his own missives from exile to ‘posterity’ ( Trist. 4.10.2).
Colin Burrow (chapter 18) considers further aspects of Ovid’s self-imitation and auto-reception. Ovid’s concern for his standing with posterity is of a piece with his constant awareness of previous literary tradition and of his place within that tradition, as discussed by Richard Tarrant (chapter 1). The urge to shape his own career into an overarching unity is motivated not just by the wish to assert some kind of control over the caprices of external fortune, but by the desire to forge for himself a literary stature comparable to that of his immediate and greatest predecessor, Virgil, whose three major works became a model of the poetic career apparently prescripted accord- ing to a sequential structure of unity in diversity, imitated by poets such as 7 Spenser and Milton. Raphael Lyne shows how the sequence of the several personae of the Ovidian career offers an alternative model to the Virgilian for post-classical poets’ self-fashioning (chapter 17).
Burrow suggests that one reason for Ovid’s popularity with Renaissance poets was that he offered these writers ways of handling their own place within the classical tradition, with the dominant model of continuity in 5 6 7 See Hardie (1999b) 268 n. 44. Hinds (1985) 25, discussing Trist. 1.7.
See Theodorakopoulos (1997).
philip hardie
change, or metamorphosis. In the earlier twentieth century the titular subject of the Metamorphoses was often seen as little more than an excuse for bizarre tales in an Alexandrian vein, and, even as that, often marginal to the 8 poem’s real concerns. Recently metamorphosis has moved to centre stage as a dominant trope of Ovidian criticism, a way of thinking about change and continuity not just in linguistic and literary areas such as genre, allegory and personification, allusion and intertextuality, and reader response, but also in Ovid’s dealings with the extratextual worlds of psychology, culture, history and ideology: a number of these areas are discussed by Andrew Feldherr (chapter 10).
As academic classicists have found new and (for us) compelling ways of talking about Ovid’s construction of his place within literary traditions, for the wider readership it may be increasingly difficult to recapture the Renaissance conviction that the relationship of the present to a classical past, perhaps to tradition of any kind, is central to a modern cultural aware- ness. In the rest of this ‘Introduction’ I point to some of the other features of the Ovidian texts that have brought about nothing less than a sea-change in their critical fortunes over the past few decades, and restored them to something approaching the centre of the cultural mainstream.
What formerly was seen as superficial wit and an irredeemable lack of seriousness has been reassessed in the light of a postmodernist flight from 9 realism and presence towards textuality and anti-foundationalism. ‘Parody’, a term often used in dismissive acknowledgement of Ovid’s entertainment value, has moved to the theoretical centre of studies of allusion and inter- textuality. Ovid exults in the fictiveness of his poetry, that written in the first person singular quite as much as self-evidently tall tales like that of the beautiful girl Scylla changed into a hideous sea-monster ( Met. 13.732–4). At the heart of the Metamorphoses we come across a debate on the truth or fiction of stories of metamorphosis, conducted by fictional characters at the 10 dinner-table of a river-god, himself a shape-shifter ( Met. 8.611–19).
The later twentieth-century novel saw a significant shift from the prevailing nineteenth-century realist tradition that concealed its own devices, back to- wards the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century self-conscious novel, defined by Robert Alter as ‘a novel that systematically flaunts its own condition of artifice and that by so doing probes into the problematic relationship between 8 For an early exercise in widening the scope of metamorphosis from subject matter to a 9 ‘functional principle’ see Galinsky (1975) 42–70.
Don Fowler was unmatched as a postmodernist critic of Latin literature, and also for his
ability to bring popular culture into his scholarship; he published little on Ovid, but there
is a gem in his ‘Pyramus, Thisbe, King Kong: Ovid and the presence of poetry’, in Fowler
10 (2000) 156–67.Discussed by Feeney (1991) 229–32; on the general issues see also Feeney (1993).
11 Introduction
real-seeming artifice and reality’. The line of Cervantes, Sterne, and Diderot may be traced back directly to the ancient prose novel, but also to Ovid. The Ovidian line surfaces explicitly, for example, in Chaucer’s House of Fame, in eighteenth-century novels by Fielding and others, to flow into the magic realism of recent novels such as Salman Rushdie’s Satanic verses, as Duncan Kennedy shows (chapter 19). Narrative self-consciousness is matched on the dramatic stage by metatheatricality: famous Shakespearean moments such as the masque in the Tempest, or Prospero’s final abjuration of his powers, or the statue scene in The Winter’s Tale have specific Ovidian models. We should not forget that Ovid was the writer of an acclaimed tragedy, the
Medea, now lost; the dream-god Morpheus who comes close to being a per-
sonification of the principle of fiction in the Metamorphoses (11.633–70) is 12 an actor, as well as a fabricator of narratives and visual images.
The uncertain relationship between text and what lies outside the text is foregrounded in other ways by Ovid. Perhaps his most instantly recognizable quality, strikingly uniform throughout his career, is his style, insistently call- 13 ing attention to the linguistic surface of the texts. A wide array of types of 14 verbal repetition impose a pointed linguistic articulation on the messy and amorphous flux of the pre-linguistic world, beginning with the repetitions that characterize the primal chaos ( Met. 1.15–17):
utque erat et tellus illic et pontus et aer, sic erat instabilis tellus, innabilis unda, lucis egens aer; nulli sua forma manebat. But earth, and air, and water, were in one.
Thus air was void of light, and earth unstable,
And water’s dark abyss unnavigable.(Dryden)
Other kinds of verbal wit, such as the pun and syllepsis (e.g. ‘At once from life and from the chariot driv’n’ (Phaethon), Addison’s translation of Met. 2.312–13) collapse conceptual boundaries and introduce disorder into a neatly ordered world. An awareness of the way in which we construct the world through language, always in danger of revealing itself as nothing but language, comes through in Ovid’s dealings with personifications, vividly imagined presences that call attention to the emptiness at their core, cul- 11 minating with the personification in Metamorphoses 12 of Fama, ‘rumour’, 12 13 Alter (1975) p. x. Pointed out by Tissol (1997) 78–9. 14 For brief further discussion of Ovid’s style see ch. 2, pp. 42–5.
The ‘Index locorum’ in Wills’ (1996) remarkable book on repetition in Latin poetry gives a
ready impression of the ubiquity of Ovidian repetition.
philip hardie
‘fame’, ‘tradition’, the power of language itself. Fama is a ‘person’ who sees and reports everything, but is herself invisible, an absent presence in the world over which she rules.
A long-standing tendency among classicists to dismiss Ovid’s verbal pyrotechnics as so much empty ‘rhetoric’ has been overtaken by a rise in the theoretical and literary-critical stock of rhetoric. Philip Hardie (chapter 2) and Alessandro Schiesaro (chapter 4) develop approaches to the rehabilita- tion of Ovidian rhetoric. Amores 1.9, a notable example of Ovidian rhetoric, takes the form of a declamation exercise developing the paradox ‘the lover is a soldier’; the opening couplet flaunts a rhetorical figure of repetition, 15
conduplicatio:
Militat omnis amans, et habet sua castra Cupido;
Attice, crede mihi, militat omnis amans.
Every lover is a soldier, and Cupid has his camp; believe me, Atticus, every
lover is a soldier.But this poem merely trumpets to the winds the secret that Latin love elegy constantly murmurs into a ditch, like Midas’ servant, that the subjectivity of the lover is a discursive construct, and the lover a stagey role-player, topics given full airing by Alison Sharrock in her discussion of both the first- person love elegies, the Amores, and the parodic didactic poems which give instructions in how to fall in and out of love, the Ars amatoria and Remedia
amoris (chapter 9). To confine the spontaneity of passion within the method
of didactic poetry is at once a paradox and a demonstration that love also has its rules and conventions.
Narcissus comes to a tragic realization of love’s superficiality, when he is trapped by what he sees on the surface of a body of water. His reaction to his reflection prompts some of Ovid’s most pointed repetitions, a reflexive 16 parody almost of the self-love of his own talent of which Quintilian was
Met. 3.425–6:
to accuse the poet,
se cupit imprudens et qui probat ipse probatur,
dumque petit petitur, pariterque accendit et ardet.
Golding’s translation loses the snappy compression, but preserves the repe- titions:
He is enamored of himselfe for want of taking heede,
And where he lykes another thing, he lykes himself in deede.
He is the partie whome he wooes, and suter that doth wooe,
15 He is the flame that settes on fire, and thing that burneth tooe. 16 For full details on the rhetorical contexts of the poem see McKeown ad loc.Inst. or. 10.1.89 nimium amator ingenii sui.
Quintil.
Introduction
These repetitions translate to the verbal plane issues of visual representation. Does a verbal repetition signal identity, or does a gap open up in the space between two instances of the same word? What is the relationship between 17 reality and representation? One of Ovid’s big topics is visual illusionism and the relationship between art and nature. Narcissus’ erotic delusion merges into artistic illusion. At Metamorphoses 3.419 Narcissus transfixed by his reflection is compared to a marble statue. The simile offers the reader a verbal image of the scene, but this is also the visual image perceived by Narcissus, since the object of his gaze, as a reflection of the statuesque viewer, also looks like a statue. A reflection in a still pool is the ultimately lifelike image, yet the gap between this image and reality is as unbridgeable for Narcissus as the gap that always divides art from the reality which it represents.
Ecphrasis, the verbal description of something seen, and (in current usage) more specifically the description of a work of art, offers Ovid recurrent opportunities to explore the links between word and image. In chapter 8 Stephen Hinds expands the discussion of Ovidian artistic ecphrasis in a far- reaching exploration of Ovidian landscapes and their afterlife. In chapter 20 Christopher Allen makes soundings in the extremely rich area of Ovid’s influence on the visual arts. Ovid’s well-developed visual sense makes him a fertile source for later painters and sculptors (not to mention landscape gardeners), both as a treasury of vividly imagined subject matter, and as a stimulus to visual artists to reflect on their own representational strategies.